earth

Amazing how much lightning can strike our planet in a short timeFlying from North Africa over Turkey towards Russia in this timelapse (this is speeded up; travelling about 5500 km would take around 10-12 minutes, covered here in 30 seconds).

Astronaut Tim Peake posted a time lapse video from the International Space Station (ISS) that caught a particularly striking view of lightening as it flew over Earth. According to the caption, all these lightening strikes happened in a matter of minutes:

Flying from North Africa over Turkey towards Russia in this timelapse (this is speeded up; travelling about 5500 km would take around 10-12 minutes, covered here in 30 seconds).

As the ISS orbits the Earth astronauts living in the space station have the chance to take amazing time lapse video like this and others.

He even took time to explain the science behind a few examples of 'proof' of a flat Earth and why they are so, so wrong.

UPDATE to the update, B.o.B. has just released a song aimed directly at Neil deGrasse Tyson and all about the flatness of Earth. NSFW Warning: This song contains a few words that are not appropriate for the scientific community.

It's called Deep Space Climate Observatory or DSCOVR, and NASA boasted about the new stunning picture it provided.

On February 11, 2015, DSCOVR was finally lofted into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. After journey of about 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) to the L1 Lagrange Point, the satellite and its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of Earth. At L1—four times farther than the orbit of the Moon—the gravitational pull of the Sun and Earth cancel out, providing a stable orbit and a continuous view of Earth. The image above was made by combining information from EPIC's red, green, and blue bands. (Bands are narrow regions of the electromagnetic spectrum to which a remote sensing instrument responds. When EPIC collects data, it takes a series of 10 images at different bands—from ultraviolet to near infrared.)

Now surely, you're thinking, "But I've seen many pictures of Earth that have been taken since 1972." Well, that's rude of you to interrupt, but NASA explained away your thoughts:

While NASA has released other blue marble images over the years, these have mostly been mosaics stitched together with image processing software—not a single view of Earth taken at one moment in time.

Yep, that's us! Right there! If you live in North, Central or the northern part of South America, you can probably see your house from there.

A supercell thunderstorm is characterized by a sustained and powerful rotating updraft. These storms originate in unstable air accompanied by a particular type of changing wind direction at various altitudes in the atmosphere; a common combination supportive of supercells is a southerly or southeasterly wind near ground level and a southwesterly or westerly wind higher up in the atmosphere.

This combination of changing wind directions creates a horizontal rolling motion in the lower atmosphere. The same rapidly rising air motions that form the thunderstorm turn this horizontal rotation into a vertical rotation, and in the case of this particular storm, this rotation is spectacularly evident in the circular striations, or layers, visible in the cloud structure.

The structure of supercell thunderstorms allows rain and hail to fall well away from the source of the warm, unstable air fueling the storm, so these storms do not choke on their own rain-cooled air. In some cases this allows supercell thunderstorms to stay intact for hours, covering tens or even hundreds of miles. In the process they can produce giant hail, very high winds, and tornadoes.